xpected of him at this point: to give his father a period of
satisfaction before he left him to do what he had not yet clearly
determined on. It was sufficiently convincing to tell Lydia he intended
to make good, but he had not much idea what he meant by it. He was
conscious chiefly that he felt marred somehow, jaded, harassed by life,
smeared by his experience of living in a gentlemanly jail. The fact that
he had left it did not restore to him his old feeling of owning the
earth. He had, from the moment of his conviction and sentence, been
outside, and his present liberty could not at once convey him inside.

He was, he knew, for one thing, profoundly tired. Nothing, he felt sure,
could give him back the old sense of air in his lungs. Confinement had
not deprived him of air. He had smiled grimly to himself once or twice,
as he thought what the sisters' idea of his prison was likely to be.
They probably had conjured up fetid dungeons. There were chains of a
surety, certainly a clank or two. As he remembered it, there was a
clanking in his mind, quite sufficient to fulfil the prison ideal. And
then he thought, with a sudden desire for man's company, the expectation
that would take you for granted, that he'd go down and see old Reardon.
Reardon had not been to call, but Jeff was too sick of solitariness to
mind that.

He went out without seeing anybody, the colonel, he knew, being at his
gentle task of cramming for Mary Nellen's evening lesson. Jeff had not
been in the street since the walk he had cut short with Madame Beattie.
He felt strange out in the world now, as if the light blinded him or the
sun burned him, or there were an air too chill--all, he reflected, in a
grim discovery, the consequence of being outside and not wanting houses
to see you or persons to bow and offer friendly hands. Reardon would
blow such vapours away with a breath of his bluff voice. But as he
reached the vestibule of the yellow house, Reardon himself was coming
out and Jeff, with a sick surprise, understood that Reardon was not
prepared to see him.

XI

Reardon stood there in his middle-aged ease, the picture of a man who
has nothing to do more hazardous than to take care of himself. His hands
were exceedingly well-kept. His cravat, of a dull blue, was suited to
his fresh-coloured face, and, though this is too far a quest for the
casual eye, his socks also were blue, an admirable match. Jeff was not
accustomed, certainly in thes